How a Connecticut mom poses as underage girl to catch online predators
When her face appears on the screen, in girlish makeup and neon-dyed hair, the image confirms the expectations of the men — adults from near and far, Rhode Island to Oklahoma — that the person they are speaking to is an underage teen, someone they could get to trust them.
In reality, the woman is Roo Powell, a 38-year old mother of three from Connecticut, and her crew is recording everything.
For the past year, Powell and her team at the New Haven nonprofit Safe From Online Sex Abuse have been filming their online encounters with men who believe they are speaking with teens, often played by Powell herself. The project, a docuseries titled “Undercover Underage,” is set to premiere Tuesday on Discovery+.
In a recent trailer for the series, Powell is seen donning the identities of Mia, Lizzie and Hannah, undergoing a transformation convincing enough that she can speak to targets in video calls, while her team attempts to track down the real identities of the men on the other side of the screen. To add to the sense of danger, the team is also seen out in the real world — always alongside police or security, Powell insists — following their vandriving targets to nail down an identity.
Powell founded the nonprofit last year after leaving her previous job with Bark, an app that allows parents to monitor their children’s phones for signs of cyberbullying or online predation. While with the company, Powell said she had her first experience creating teenager characters — or “decoys” — a process that she wrote about and later refined after being contacted by a production crew that turned her article into a show.
“We kind of just threw a decoy online, whereas now we have a really thorough process for putting together our decoy,” Powell said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media. “We really develop, we build-out our entire character because a real teenager has friends and hobbies and an astrological sign and a family or a best friend.”
The premise of “Undercover Underage” appears to follow in the same vein as other undercover sting shows popularized by Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator,” which drew controversy prior to it’s 2007 cancellation over allegations of entrapment as well as the suicide of a man as the show’s crew filmed police approaching his house.
Powell said she is aware of those concerns, adding that the show has taken lengths to avoid identifying any of the men who engage with her underage characters, blurring their faces and distorting their voices.
“I don’t love being called, you know, Chris Hansen of 2021 for a number of reasons,” Powell said, reflecting on the criticism sparked by “To Catch a Predator” and its host.
Speaking to Hearst Connecticut Media this week, Powell and Discovery+ declined to provide information about men arrested as a result of evidence turned over to police during the show’s filming, other than confirming that at least one arrest occurred in Connecticut, where Powell and SOSA conducted an operation posing as a high school student from Stamford.
Unlike Hansen, Powell added that she has never confronted the subject of one of her operations face-to-face, leaving that work to police.
“It is not my job to out anyone,” Powell said. Even with such precautions, the development and filming of undercover operations for entertainment can pose both legal and ethical dilemmas, according to Mike Lawlor, a professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and a former state representative.
For example, Lawlor said police are typically subject to tougher rules against entrapment — the idea that the government cannot induce someone to commit a crime — and private individuals working undercover to identify suspected child predators could potentially run afoul of those lines if they coordinate too closely with police.
“If [the police] start with the sex talk, that’s entrapment,” Lawlor said. “But not if they’re not a government actor.”
Powell said she and her team work closely with law enforcement, including Norwalk Police Detective Mark Suda, who served as a consultant on the show. During her conversations with men online, Powell said she and her team mention the age of their character — or “decoy” — several times, while giving the adult repeated chances to walk away from the conversation.
“We avoid entrapment,” Powell said. “We don’t suggest a meet, we don’t say, ‘Hey, do you want to send me pictures of this.’ They have to really be the ones to say, ‘Hey, do you want to come meet?’ ‘Hey, do you want to do x, y, z.’”
Suda, a 28-year veteran of the force who works on the special services unit, said many of the men would contact Powell’s decoys within seconds of appearing online.
“She’s a trained and skilled child advocate, she’s done many of these cases prior to the show,” Suda said. “Over and over … she reminds these guys that she’s 15 years old.”
During the filming of the show, Powell said SOSA communicated with police in Connecticut and six other states, though she declined to say how many arrests or prosecutions resulted from the efforts. In some cases, she said, the group turns over evidence to police only to hear about an arrest later from news reports.
In addition to filming for the show, Powell said she is also engaged in speaking to children and school groups about online abuse, while SOSA’s staff work in other areas such as helping tech companies understand language patterns to help identify potential grooming and abuse on their platforms.
Powell said “her hope” is that attention from the show will allow that work to continue while also serving as a deterrent for potential predators.
“It’s somber, it’s this sobering fact that now this person has been arrested, it affects their family, it affects their kids, it affects their job,” Powell said. “There’s such a big ripple effect, which is why I’m hoping these stories lead to prevention, not just something exciting or something buzzy.”